


strays

by arbitrarily



Category: Mad Men, The Girls - Emma Cline
Genre: 1970s, Drinking & Talking, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-15 16:24:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13617120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Sally came out to California to see her dad. That's the official story.





	strays

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



Sally came out to California to see her dad. That’s the official story.

The actual story is a lot uglier, more complicated, nothing Sally could easily articulate to herself or while perched on the edge of a barstool, seeking out a receptive face. The important thing she had learned in Los Angeles is the elevator pitch. The log line. I came to see my father. My mother is dead.

The actual story leaves Sally at a bar outside of California state lines called The Dusty Saloon. There's only one car in the parking lot, a good-sized dent pocking the back fender.

When Sally walks into The Dusty Saloon she finds it equally empty. Stale cigarette stink and artificial cold, a hint of mildew and old spilled beer seeping out of the dim lighting. There's a lone girl working behind the bar. She has a dirty dishrag in her hand and she lifts her head to watch Sally. After too long of a pause, Sally stranded indecisive in the doorway, the desert heat pushing sweaty at the back of her neck, the girl says, "You're gonna have to shut the door. You're letting the cold out."

Sally shuts the door. She steps inside and approaches the bar.

The girl behind the bar looks at Sally like she's relieved Sally isn't somebody else. Someone she knows. Knew. The past becomes present tense when it's all you ever think about. Sally knows that. The girl behind the bar is the kind of girl that worries about ghosts; Sally knows that too, just by looking at her. Sally is like that too, but also the opposite: she is always waiting for people who will never come back. 

The girl is short, round-faced. Not exactly plain, but fairly anonymous. She looks too young to be behind a bar. She looks younger than Sally. Her hair is dingy, worn in a middle part. Needs a wash, or a cut. Sally hears Betty’s voice in her head. The older Sally gets, the more like Betty she becomes. Rather than Don. That’s regrettable; Don’s skills are considerably more useful. She has held onto the one trait of his at the least: she walked away. She came out here. 

"How're you tonight?" the girl asks, disinterested but courteous. 

Sally shrugs a bare, sunburnt shoulder. "I'm here," she says. She takes the stool closest to the girl and pulls out a pack of cigarettes from her purse. Up close, the girl looks older, or just tired.

"What can I get you?"

"A beer's fine, I guess." Sally looks around the empty bar. No patrons, no other employees. "You might as well drink one with me, too," she says. She flicks the lighter.

 

 

The girl's name is Evie and she's from California. Her grandmother was famous, or something. She lived out there until she didn't and then she took off for nowhere in particular only to realize nowhere came with a price tag and she needed money. 

"I'll go back," Evie says. To California. The dead famous grandmother. "Eventually."

"Yeah?" It's only hearing Evie say that that Sally realizes she has been operating with a similar eventuality in mind. She'll go back to New York. Without Don. 

"Whereabout are you from?" Evie asks. Sally finds the way she asks it more interesting than the question. There's a great remove there Sally finds appealing. Evie speaks with the flat affect of someone who has seen things she wishes she could forget. Her father fucking the neighbor. Her mother reduced to something withered and dying. Something worse Sally lacks the experience to imagine.

So Sally tells her she is from New York. And before Evie can say what everyone Sally has met out this way has said - "that's a long ways away," as if Sally doesn't know basic American geography - she says, "I came to see my dad."

"It was just something I felt I had to do," Sally says. This isn’t true. Not even close. The only pressing need she had felt back in New York was to get out, to go anywhere and try to be anyone. That anywhere happened to be California was purely coincidental. She had found Megan instead of her father, the passage of time making itself known in the new outcropping of lines that sketched across her face. Coupled with the faraway look to Megan’s eyes, it gave her the look of a lost woman peering out from behind a gauzy curtain.

“I don’t know where he is,” was all Megan had said to her in greeting. Her hip cocked, skirt too short, a lit cigarette raised to her wide mouth.

Sally had shrugged. “Join the club.”

She only stayed for the weekend. Any longer would have supposed too much had ever occurred between her and Megan. It would have been the beginnings of a sketch that looked a lot like a family tree. The house with the stick people parents, the children that children draw. Megan never mentioned Betty, and for that Sally was grateful. People in New York had liked to take Sally by the elbow and say to her, “I am so sorry about your mother,” as if they were partly to blame for her death.

So maybe all of this — the plane ticket she bought with the money she had taken from Henry’s wallet, standing alone in the baggage claim at LAX and pretending she had any idea of where to go, Megan and her sad bungalow with the sad friends who spoke of the counterculture with that exact word, like it was a place they had heard of but lacked the means to reach. Hitchhiking back east out of California and landing here, in this dusty bar in southern Nevada closer to Death Valley than to Vegas, maybe all of that really was something she had to do.

“There’s nothing anybody has to do," Evie is saying, flat and ungiving. "There’s just the things that other people tell you, and then there’s obedience.”

Sally scowls. She feels caught-out and read, nothing challenging on the page she provided. “Fine. This is me telling you I want another beer.”

Evie nearly smiles. Her mouth quirks upward, transforming the entire landscape of her face. She’s younger, she’s revealed an older dormant part of herself, curious and inquisitive and bright. Promising. 

Evie reaches across the bar and takes Sally’s empty glass. The sides of it are smudged with Sally’s fingerprints, now Evie’s, too. She’s a clumsy pour, letting the beer go foamy at the top.

Sally is quiet, the glass cold to the touch when Evie places it down in front of her. "I don't even know why I'd want to see him. He left." Evie doesn't say anything, but when Sally looks up she feels seen. Understood, maybe. All the same, she says, "I don't know why I'm telling you any of this."

There's a flicker of something across Evie's face that Sally doesn't know how to name, but she knows it as familiar. “We’re all held hostage by the people who made us,” Evie says. She says it like a universal truth.

 

 

Two beers later, Sally follows Evie out into the dark parking lot. To the lone car with the dented fender.

“You got somewhere to stay the night?” Evie asks her. It’s less an act of generosity, and more one of assumed responsibility.

Sally shakes her head. 

"Alright then," Evie says.

Sally steps closer to her. Night in the desert is so starkly different from night in the city. New York. Los Angeles. There's a naked intimacy to it, and perhaps that's why instead of saying the words, _thank you_ , Sally presses her mouth to Evie's. 

She wants to be able to say that Evie tastes like something sweet and promising, comforting or fulfilling. Like anything at all. She thinks this is what a girl should want when kissing another, late at night, lost, caught in the desert heat rising up off the pot-holed asphalt. Instead all that’s there inside of Evie is a hard-fought emptiness. It tastes good.

 

 

 


End file.
